Why Selfies Are Degrading Leadership

"Leadership results from a focus on goals larger than the Self-ie." Flickr/barnigomez
Standing in the ever speedy checkout line at Trader Joe's yesterday I bumped into a big chalk board strategically positioned between me and the irritatingly cheerful cashiers. "LEADERS WANTED — apply here" was written in the grocery store chain's bold and breezy style.

I was taken aback. Were they looking for a new CEO? If so, maybe I should apply.

No, it was for the additional stocking personnel they wanted to hire — in the frozen fish department.

If every person gets to be a leader today, where are the followers? If every job is a leadership job and if every person is assumed to be a leader without earning the honor, has its luster, gravity, and responsibility been lost?

In the military, if everyone were a leader, no battles would be fought and no risks would be borne by those who are supposed to carry out the orders from the higher-ups.

The Selfie phenomenon might have us becoming so mesmerized by our own images that we may actually think that we are our own leaders — our own individual startup enterprise — and that we don't need to listen to anyone else for guidance, adhere to orders, or to ever be subordinate to anyone.

When taking a Selfie you don't wait to fall in line; you go to the head of the line. Selfies show an organization of one. Leaders and followers together make an organization of many. What happened to teamwork, where someone actually gave the orders and everyone else followed? Today the result of giving orders might be chaos, doubt, and questioning authority — and this is common, especially in incubating startup tech firms.

I learned this the hard way. I was asked to address a group of teenagers, and my talk was to be inspirational. I spent days preparing remarks on leadership, illustrating it with stories of outsized leaders from the past. I even made an attempt to link these stories to their own lives.

They were not having any of it, and it wasn't that they were just bored by my talk. I was a total flop. First they started reading their emails, then texting each other, then actually shouting and talking with each other in total disregard for the speaker on the podium.

With a panic coming over me, not knowing actually what to do next to control the crowd or to attempt to lead it, I caved into their chaos and dismissed the whole group in defeat. My talk may have been inadequate to captivate them, but they were totally disinterested in being led down any path — at least into a talk about leadership!

There was no followership in that hall and therefore no information, no inspiration, no examples, and no rules were passed on to the group. We would have been a sloppy infantry group.

There is a big reset underway. Millennials are more engaged in creating social enterprises and doing good works and having more impact than previous generations. But, while they may be linked together by social networks, they are doing all of this on their own terms, looking for individually gauged measurements of satisfaction and reward, rather than collective organizational rewards.

It's tough to get people who are taking pictures of themselves to picture themselves in close physical proximity to a group working together, especially in a time when confidence in any type of group — community, governmental, or corporate organizations — is running low. But there is danger in this and disruption ahead.

Leadership and followership go hand in hand, and they result from a focus on goals larger than the Self-ie. The leader today has to go beyond conventional means to coalesce a team. The leader has to illustrate, in graphic terms, the cost of not adhering to the team plan, to the strategy, and then the leader has to incentivize his followers to join in an effort bigger than themselves.

If followers want to be shown the results of collective action and the importance of leading, show them the personal expense and loss that can occur from not doing this and the rewards of focus on cause, purpose, calling, strategy, impact for the good of the group — outside of self.

James Rosebush is the CEO and founder of GrowthStrategy.us and was a Reagan White House official.